Digital music players are proliferating as stand-alone consumer electronic devices (such as MP3 players), as bundled components within portable devices such as personal digital assistants and cell-phones, and as home network appliances. Listeners typically build up their own personal libraries of digital songs, which are stored on memory units such as hard disk drives and removable memory cards. Digital songs are typically acquired through the Internet via subscription services and peer-to-peer exchanges, or by converting songs from a compact disc (“CD”) and importing them into an MP3 library.
Digital songs typically include audio data and peripheral data, referred to as meta-data, used to index the songs within the listener's library. For example, within an MP3 file, meta-data is accessed through an ID3Tag. By indexing the songs, a listener can search his library and access individual songs therein. Typically audio players provide a user interface through which users view meta-data.
Reference is now made to FIG. 1, which is an illustration of a prior art user interface for a Windows media player, indicating meta-data displayed within a window frame 110, and an index for accessing individual songs, displayed within a window frame 120.
Building up a digital music library requires a lot of work. Typically, the listener first searches the Internet for one or more songs of interest, identifies locations of the songs, and downloads them into a database associated with a media player. Songs are typically stored as digital files, formatted in compliance with a standard format, such as MP3 or WMA. Once the songs are downloaded, the listener typically uses software such as Windows Media player (“WMP”) or Winamp to play the songs on a computer, or alternatively he uses a hardware device, such as an Ipod™ or an MP3 player, to play the songs. WMA files embed meta-data within the files, and also within the file names themselves.
Often individuals spend numerous nights downloading their favorite songs and building their own personal music libraries. Downloading music files from the Internet may infringe copyrights unless the files are obtained through a service that pays royalties to the recording industry.
A shortcoming in the digital music world is the great effort required to build custom music libraries. An alternative is to purchase libraries that have been prepared by others. But often someone else's library does not match a listener's taste, and the listener prefers to collect his own favorite songs.
Popular sources for listeners to hear their favorite songs are music stations. Cable, satellite broadcast and the Internet provide music channels for almost every genre of music—classical music, rock and roll, jazz, music of the 80's, etc. A listener can enjoy music according to his taste by subscribing to such broadcast services.
Ideally, a listener building up his personal digital music library would like to be able to record his favorite songs from such broadcast services. Raw audio recording from a music station, however, does not provide the meta-data necessary to identify such songs and incorporate them into a digital music library. Using today's technology, a listener has no choice but to painstakingly label each such song recorded from a music station with appropriate meta-data—a process that can last hours in order to build even a modest library with a few hundred songs.
Moreover, in addition to identifying each song, the listener has to manually separate each song from the next, because the songs are played sequentially on the music station.